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Does language affect the way you think?

Debate continues about the affect language has on how we understand different cultures.

11 06 2002

While most of us try to resist stereotyping people from other countries, it’s very easy to do and we’re often tempted to conclude that people from other nations think differently from us.

If we’ve learned their language, it’s even more tempting to believe that the way their language is structured and the words they have for things must contribute to these seemingly different thought processes.

To take a simple example, different languages have names for a device which either pushes screws, pulls them or turns them. If I were to show you these devices, they’d all look the same and you’d call them screwdrivers.

The question is whether people with different languages think about screws differently because of the words.

Well it turns out from a variety of experiments, that when you take certain tasks which are described differently in various languages and remove the language component by just looking at what people understand in their minds – the differences disappear. People seem to think the way they do regardless of their language.

All sorts of other things affect behaviour such as our environment and our genes – but it seems as though learning French, for instance, isn’t going go to turn you into a café habitué with a Gitane habit, or, perhaps thankfully, a Monsieur Le Pen.